Adrian Crowley has released a new single, Quinn The Adventurer, today (10th July) on Dimple Discs in association with Bring Your Own Hammer.
The notes for the release tell the story of James Quinn (alias Tim O’Brien), a young Irish Catholic who left Belfast in 1920. He spent the next four years travelling through North and South America. By 1924, he was in Hollywood, California, working as an extra in silent films alongside Charlie Chaplin. On 20th May 1924, Los Angeles newspapers ran front-page stories noting that LA Police detectives had arrested Quinn while he was lecturing on and displaying a collection of shrunken heads from the Amazon at a seaside amusement arcade called the Long Beach Pike. Quinn was confined in the LA County Jail and charged with burglary. He was accused of stealing the shrunken heads and other artefacts, valued at $25000. O’Brien pled not guilty but was found guilty of ‘first degree burglary’ and later sentenced to ‘the State Prison of San Quentin for the period provided by law’. Quinn, however, never spends a night in San Quentin but rather skips bail and is next heard of in Colón, Panama. You might imagine meeting Quinn on board a ship from Panama to his next port of call, Havana, Cuba, and hearing about his travels through the Americas.
Bring Your Own Hammer brings historians and composers together to build new song cycles from historical sources, and to reinterpret material rooted in nineteenth-century Ireland and its diaspora. It is not a band or a collective but, by its own description, a faction — armed with voices and instruments rather than sticks and two-handed wattles. We first covered the series in 2022, when Crowley and Brigid Mae Power shared Golden Streets, Bitter Tears, and returned to it last month for Lavinia Blackwall and Neil Farrell’s The Cruel Father and Sophie Coyle’s The Girl from Spark’s Lake.
Quinn The Adventurer will appear on From The Tombs, a BYOH double album of 21 songs following crime, law and order through Ireland and its diaspora in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sean O’Hagan, Luke Haines, Bernard Butler, Damian O’Neill, Michael J. Sheehy, Brigid Mae Power, Linda Buckley and Cian Nugent are among the other contributors.
The Dublin-based Crowley has built a body of work over two decades, grounded in a darkly poetic sensibility and an arrestingly resonant baritone, most recently on the John Parish-produced Measure Of Joy (2025). We’ve followed him through The Watchful Eye of the Stars and his collaboration with Marry Waterson, Cuckoo Storm.
Bandcamp: https://bringyourownhammerpresents.bandcamp.com/track/quinn-the-adventurer-by-adrian-crowley
More here: https://linktr.ee/byohammer